Environment to Grow: The Value for the ISAO Employee

We choose a company to work as a whole set of factors:

These are such as if it lets you do what you want to,

if the pay is good,

if the people around are nice,

if you can take enough, desirable off-days,

or if the extra work is not too much, etc.

Each person puts different importance in each factor.

Naturally, people in ISAO chose their workplace because they liked ISAO as a whole.

Among all these factors, something ISAO is proud of, and considers to be special, is its “Environment to Grow”

Why Growing is Important

Personal growth comes with certain strictness and pain.

I know some people want to make money in an as easy way as possible.

For the people as such, ISAO environment where “you must keep growing” might look like nothing but suffering.

There are two reasons ISAO puts great emphasis on growth.

The first one is because by growing, you will have much more you can do, and your work will become more exciting.

There’s no genuine enjoyment in what you can easily acquire.

The other one is because it is to raise individual market value.

The today’s society is said to be VUCA world and it is quite difficult to design one’s career based on his/her present status and its extension.

VUCA: An acronym stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity.

In the time like this, you need to be strong as an individual to survive. To grow is for individuals. Of course, having individuals who continuously grow will result in creating a stronger team, so it is good for the company too.

Challenges in Maintaining an Environment to Grow

Then, every company should just ask its employees to keep growing all the time.

That might be what came into your mind.

However, it is not easy for a company to provide an environment to continue growing and to ask employees to keep growing.

There are two reasons for this.

First, the problem with the employees who don’t agree with the idea;

Managing people with the concept “To grow, or to go” makes a quite severe company culture. There will be some leaving because of that. The company will be asked if it’s prepared to keep that culture at that cost.

Next, some events not beneficial in a short-term perspective, might happen.

Let me show you an example.

Mr. A is a trustful person in a stable position as a leader in his project which he has developed for the past five years.

However, as for himself, he has not been finding new challenges to grow in his position. He has grown so far but, will stop growing in the position.

What should a company do under such a circumstance?

As for the company, just keeping Mr. A in the same position is a comforting and steady option. If it replaces Mr. A with someone else, there would be a risk for the team or the project to go down.

For the company, shifting Mr. A to a different position is crucially difficult decision to make.

Nevertheless, it has to assign people based on the possibilities of individual growth and the company must be prepared to take the responsibility of the action.

Staff Assignment Like This: Nothing Out of Ordinary ISAO

In ISAO, everyone has this idea. Therefore, when they find someone seems to be stagnating, people will ask questions such as “Will you keep growing doing that job?”, or ”How can you grow more?” even if I kept silent.

In ISAO, there’s no value in the idea “stability”. As an individual, or as a company, they both grow more and more and to reach higher standards.

The Challenges in Super Flat Organization

ISAO is a company with Super Flat Organization, which has no boss. Everyone chooses their coaches and evaluators, so there’s far much less stress on the human relationships. On the other hand, if you don’t work on your tasks autonomously, you will be left behind in the team, and there is always the strictness that you’re asked to keep growing.

Looks easy on the first glance, but the essential is unexpectedly challenging.

That is ISAO Super Flat Organization.